In this conversation prompted by the publication of Julian Stallabrass's Killing for Show: Photography, War and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), Stallabrass and Mignon Nixon discuss the roles played by photography in two wars that, Stallabrass contends, were simultaneously staged for, and concealed from, the camera. The discussion encompasses diverse modes of war photography, from photojournalism and official military photography to amateur and trophy images, aftermath photographs, and found images used by contemporary artists. It dwells on questions of memory, systemic cruelty, trauma, and melancholy, and on shifts in technology, media, and social relations that have altered the dynamics of killing for show over time, without eliminating the imperative.

A brief remembrance of art-historian Linda Nochlin that celebrates her creative vigilance in attending to the nexus of women, art, and power in an era of ongoing political regression.

Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson speak with several October editors about afrotropes, recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity. Copeland and Thompson argue that ultimately such forms are transformed and deformed in response to the specific social, political, and institutional conditions that inform the experiences of black people as well as changing perceptions of blackness.

Mignon Nixon reflects on the Manchester Arena bombing, London Bridge and Borough Market attack, and Grenfell Tower fire in London, as well as the 2017 Venice Biennial, via J-B Pontalis's writings on the psychoanalytic notion of death-work. Nixon argues that the defining problem of Christina Macel's exhibition Viva Art Viva in Venice, an exhibition so insistently art- and artist-positive—“designed with artists, by artists, and for artists” as the press release notes—is that its aesthetics of redemption is predicated on a negation of life, and thereby a negation of art.

Wilfred Bion, a mid-twentieth-century pioneer of the psychoanalysis of groups, described a group as the repository of the mad parts of ourselves. The group helps us to tame our madness, but it may also exaggerate it, reviving infantile trends, and an anxious group will typically select its maddest member as its leader. The mad leader is a kind of baby king, an avatar of our infantile past, who licenses a departure from reality and, in particular, a denial of our own badness. That is to say, the mania of a mad president relieves us of the responsibility to mourn. Afflicted as we are by a manic negation of reality—the realities of climate change, nuclear armaments, the pain of others—Nixon argues that we also live in a time of mass melancholia. For the author the confrontation of such a psychical reality of melancholia is necessary for our survival, and writers, teachers, and artists must help turn it into creative resistance.

Hitler deployed the first pilot-less flying bombs, the doodlebugs, as weapons of terror over London. “The drone of the planes,” Virginia Woolf related, is “like the sawing of a branch overhead. Round and round it goes, sawing and sawing.” It falls to the civilian under aerial attack to “fight with the mind” by “thinking against the current, not with it.” Thinking in darkness, thinking in bed, thinking with the unconscious—Woolf defends the supposedly “futile activity of idea-making” as a counterpoint to the drone of war.